Fair Trade: Agreements
According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Jamaica is a party to the CARICOM trade agreement. From research, I have discovered that this agreement deals with the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Cuba, Venezuela and Canada. I won’t go into deal with what each agreement states, but I will briefly discuss the effective dates and summaries for what these agreements accomplish. CARICOM are member states that formed this group in retort to the recent challenges and opportunities in the global economy. At the regional level, bilateral trade agreements were set and signed. In other words, CARICOM was set to protect countries and their assets and also to promote fair trading. CARICOM has tried initiations with other countries as well, like Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. The first of these agreements to be signed was the Venezuela trade agreement which was signed October 1992 and put into place in 2000. This agreement like many others, was set for attempts at promoting sales of goods and stimulating investments. One of the most recently signed agreement is the Costa Rica Free Trade Agreement on March 9th, 2004. This agreement applies to trading in goods and supplies further negotiations in Competition Policy and double Taxation and Services. Although this was assigned in 2004, it has yet to implement force in Jamaica. Institutions that are relevant to this agreement are still in the process of finishing legislative measures to carry out this agreement. This agreement might be beneficial for Jamaica to join because increasing in taxes will make more money for Jamaica especially when they are in a lot of debt currently.
